Out of Hands by Game River
Waking up from a dream, bandaged from head to toe, you hear conflicting voice voices in your head. You are ascribed to be suffering from a type of madness that causes vivid dreams.
To get rid of this madness is the goal of Out of Hands: find an escape, and get back to normalcy.
Through the Gates of Memory and Dream
To get rid of this madness, you must find the source by exploring your dreams, which consist of jumbled, often abstract places constructed from prior memories, flashes of the past in the forms of odd characters or locations. These give more insight into your psyche as well as your history.
I really liked this approach. It cleverly uses environmental storytelling and dialogue interactions to unravel its narrative. The game fed me enough nuggets of information to make the narrative surprisingly compelling. Abstract places and vague visuals added just enough context to allow me to infer more about what is happening and what has happened. It’s one of the game’s best achievements.
Great writing helps the narrative shine. It’s introspective and abstract. NPCs speak in riddles and poems. Symbolism abounds alongside thought-provoking and heartfelt moments. Out of Hands has plenty to say regarding life, love, regret, and guilt and tackles these themes with confidence and tact without ever feeling too vague or confusing. This clever approach to a narrative largely told through dreams makes uncovering plot details more satisfying.
Look at Your Hands
At its core, Out of Hands is an exploration and card-battling game. Each dreamscape is a different area to explore, a map filled with points of interest, characters to talk to, and items to find. Exploring is a treat because you never know what visual you’ll see next.
One area is an apartment building where a large, angry man’s eyeball peers through a window as if to watch your every move. Another location has you traverse an abandoned school campus, a place where the hopes for a bright future were once realized. The aforementioned storytelling each place provides makes these areas interesting to explore.
Familiar combat counteracts the more abstract nature of everything else. If you’ve played a turn-based card battler, you’ll know what to expect.
In this regard, the game doesn’t veer too much from the norm, which isn’t a bad thing because it’s a fun combat system. Various cards attack enemies in the back row, do bonus damage – like adding a bleed effect – or my favorite: cards that attack multiple enemies at once. And this is just the foundation, as the game has many cards that boost your stats or even extend your turn.
There are so many different cards to find and customize your deck with, and you can buy them with the game’s currency, loot them from defeated enemies, or find them by exploring the map. My deck ended up being filled with a lot of healing and defensive cards, which allowed me to build a deck around my strengths and weaknesses.
A Place I Saw in a Dream
Visually, the game is a hodgepodge of differing styles: stop-motion dolls, hand-drawn 2D animations, and FMV video. There is so much going on visually that the game surprised me with each new area’s bizarre places and weird, unnerving enemies. Each dream is so wonderfully executed, dipping its toe into each style and fitting the aesthetic perfectly.
I must make a mention of the game’s use of generative AI assets. The developers used command prompts to generate images and videos – the producer states that 10 percent of total game assets were created by AI – and it’s hard to tell sometimes what is AI and what isn’t. I didn’t find it too distracting, nor do I think it made my experience worse. Some enemies look out of place, but the weird AI art fits oddly well with the game’s dream-inspired, otherworldly aesthetic. But for some players, it may be a turn-off.
The music brings the game’s dreamscapes to life. Dark synths, haunting violins, and groovy uptempo drum beats fit each scene perfectly. From lively combat music to heartstrings-pulling tracks during emotional narrative moments, the music does a lot to set the mood as well as drive home key narrative moments.
The Verdict:
Out of Hands is one of the most unique games I’ve ever played. I like so much about it, from its writing to its visual style. It does a lot right, and it’s hard for me to find many flaws. The act of exploring weird dreams has never been this compelling, and I will be thinking about this game for a long time.
Out of Hands is available via Steam.
Check out the official trailer for Out of Hands below:
